Brexit: Parliamentary Approval of the Outcome of Negotiations with the European Union

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Monday 28th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, the sunlit uplands of Brexit have disappeared into the fog. The land of milk and honey has morphed into the country of damaged prosperity, with jobs in peril. Brexit-supporting businessman James Dyson is upping sticks and moving his business to Singapore, while Jacob Rees-Mogg is moving his money to Dublin to continue to enjoy the benefits of the single market. It sounds like a case of rats leaving a sinking ship.

Instead of £350 million a week for the NHS, we have a health service haemorrhaging EU nurses it cannot afford to lose. Liam Fox, a man who invoked the slogan “Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week”, claims that delaying Brexit would open up a gulf in trust with the electorate. That is beyond parody.

The possibility of a crash-out no deal, hopefully ruled out by MPs tomorrow, apparently raises for the Government a prospect of civil disorder requiring troops and martial law. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, that ruling out no deal is not institutionalised timidity but about ensuring that the British people get their food and vital medicines.

No longer promising Utopia, the pro-leave case now boils down, at best, to how we must grit our teeth and summon up our blitz spirit to endure and survive the misery of the coming storm as it is “the will of the people”. There is no willingness, of course, to update our knowledge of what that “will” is in the light of Brexit reality rather than Brexit fantasy.

This gloomy prospect is now accompanied by abuse. It is not only abuse from the thugs who jostled and harassed Anna Soubry just yards from here, with the police apparently having forgotten what happened to Jo Cox, or the abuse affecting EU citizens and minority British citizens who are the target of hate speech and hate crime, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire. Unacceptable language is also coming from senior members of the Tory party. We heard former Minister and ERG leading light, Suella Braverman, directing against a former Prime Minister of her own party, Sir John Major, the populist insult of “remainer elite”, leaving aside that he was brought up in Brixton with no silver spoon and no Eton mess, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, put it, unlike some Brexiters we could think of. Miss Braverman, I believe, attended Oxford and the Sorbonne. Her sense of irony seems deficient.

Just this weekend, ERG member and former Tory Whip Mark Francois accused Airbus boss Tom Enders of ‘Teutonic arrogance” adding, “My father was a D-day veteran; he never submitted to bullying by any German and neither will his son”. He was talking about the boss of a company which provides 14,000 jobs in this country directly and another 120,000 in the supply chain. I wonder whether these remarks came up in any conversations that our Prime Minister is having with Angela Merkel. I cannot see the German Chancellor being much impressed by Mr Francois’ idea of winning friends and influencing people. Quite how this type of pseudo-Churchillian rhetoric, as one journalist aptly described it, is supposed to be helpful in the contemporary promotion of “global Britain” is beyond my comprehension.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hain, about the disgraceful attitude from too many in public life towards the Irish Government, whom we need as friends. It would be good if the Prime Minister brought these people in her party to heel. The trouble is that she set the tone of unpleasantness with her “Go Home” vans and “hostile environment” at the Home Office, culminating in the scandal of Windrush. It was she who called her internationalist countrymen citizens of nowhere and called EU free-movers queue-jumpers. She even once made up a totally false story about how a migrant was invoking in his claim to stay his human right to have a relationship with his cat. You would never think from all these gratuitous insults that this is the group who won. Surely they should be full of joie de vivre, confident in their own assurance that Brexit is a fabulous idea that will make everyone better off. Or do they know it will not?

The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, quite correctly wants these divisions to be healed, but when the Prime Minister claimed, as she did last week, that,

“a second referendum could damage social cohesion”,—[Official Report, Commons, 21/1/19; col. 26.]

I think we are entitled to retort in the light of Tory Brexiter utterances: “Physician, heal thyself and thy party”. Brexiter politicians, who are allowing themselves plenty of opportunities to review and change their mind, insist on denying even one such opportunity to the voters. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, that it was in fact Nigel Farage who said that, if remain won, he would want a further referendum.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, I would be interested in hearing from the Minister the latest on the manoeuvring to get the backstop removed. Is it true that the Government are putting a three-line Whip on the Murrison-Brady amendment tomorrow which they know the EU will reject because it is incompatible with the withdrawal agreement? Apparently, the ERG is rejecting it, too, so what is the point? The noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, explained that there is none.

The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, said that the British people voted for Brexit. Is he able to tell us which of the 57 varieties the 37% voted for? I gently remind the noble Lord, Lord Desai, that my noble friend Lord Newby did not say that the 37% does not count. That is not the attitude of any remainer I know. My noble friend simply corrected the Minister, who said last week that leave voters represented a majority of the population.

The country needs an end to hypocrisy and double standards, and the same chance to think again that MPs are being allowed. We must have a people’s vote with an option to stay in the EU. As my noble friend Lord Campbell of Pittenweem said, we will accept the result of a further referendum based on informed consent. Then we would make a start on achieving real social cohesion in this country. In the meantime, these Benches will support the opposition Motion.